America's fifth attempt to isolate a president ... Will Trump be the first victim?

Mohammed Al - Minshawi - Washington

77 days after the start of investigations into what has come to be known as the "Ukraine Gate", the US House of Representatives Judicial Committee has announced a parliamentary indictment against President Donald Trump that includes two articles: the abuse of power and the obstruction of Congress.

Democrats accuse Trump of misusing his powers by linking military aid to Ukraine and holding a summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky by opening an investigation into corruption suspicions related to the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrat candidate for the 2020 presidential election.

The charge of obstructing the work of Congress relates to Trump's pressure on his top aides not to appear before congressional investigation committees, and the White House has refused any cooperation with the investigations.

And the measures to isolate Trump, which the House of Representatives undertook, revealed the depth of the division that has occurred in American policy during the past fifty years.

The inconsistency of the members of both parties did not come as a surprise to the experts who followed the public investigation sessions during the past weeks, as no Republican member voted alongside the Democrats in favor of opening an investigation into Trump's violations.

And the condition of consensus among the members of Congress positively on the removal of a president reflects a contradiction in positions that was not repeated before among members of the Democratic and Republican parties in the case of historical precedents related to the dismissal.

Republicans today and yesterday
The position of the members of the two parties differed clearly from the position of their counterparts during the attempt to isolate Republican Richard Nixon in the 1970s, and to try to isolate Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

With the majority of House Republicans expected to vote in favor of the president's conviction, Trump will become the third president to be indicted by Congress, after Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, while Nixon submitted his resignation before the vote to remove him after he was certain Republicans would abandon him.

On February 6, 1974, the House of Representatives voted by 410 votes to just four votes since the Judicial Committee began its investigations into the President's removal.

American historian Timothy Nephtali believes that "Congressional leaders needed bipartisan support in order to secure the support of the majority of the American people to begin the isolation process, and so that investigations do not appear to be seeking party service goals."

With the House of Representatives in which the Democrats have a majority of 235 members close to 200 for the Republicans, the role of the Senate with a Republican majority of 53 members, against 47 for the Democrats, will start.

The removal of the president requires a two-thirds majority, or 66 members, which is difficult to imagine until now, unless there are surprises of high-caliber. It is believed that the Senate will stand in the way of any progress in the process of withdrawing confidence and isolating President Trump.

Senate Majority President Mitch McConnell declared that "Washington Democrats were and are still seeking a way to nullify the outcome of the 2016 elections in which they lost."

As for the Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, he pledged to fight the measures to isolate the president and mentioned the logic of Senator McConnell himself, saying that "Nancy Pelosi is not satisfied with the outcome of the 2016 elections, these elections ended with Trump's victory."

There is no precedent for isolating a president
Since the creation of the United States 240 years ago, four attempts have been made to isolate the President, all of which have ended in failure. These are:

The first attempt : It was in 1840 against President John Taylor, who served him as a result of the midterm congressional elections and majority transition to the President's party and the attempt ended quickly.

The second attempt : It targeted President Andrew Johnson in 1868 due to his dismissal of the then popular Defense Minister Edmund Santon. The dismissal passed by the House of Representatives, but it did not pass in the Senate for obtaining only 65 votes, one vote less than the required majority.

The third attempt : It started in 1973 as a result of the Watergate scandal, and President Richard Nixon chose to resign when he realized that the democratic majority could pass his dismissal decision due to his low popularity and the difficulty of Republicans defending him.

The fourth attempt : It took place in 1998 against President Bill Clinton after his involvement in a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, one of the trainees in the White House, and his lie about this relationship. The House of Representatives passed the impeachment law, but failed to obtain a two-thirds majority in the Senate. And then President Clinton's popularity rose dramatically.